Why I Publish "The Guelph-Back-Grounder"

I've always had a sort of "love/hate" relationship with journalism. A lot of my friends are professional reporters. But I've also found myself absolutely appalled by what gets published in newspapers or broadcast over the airwaves and Web---even the stuff that is quite mainstream. I've had people ask "Why?", so I thought I'd take a post to give at least some of the reasons.

First of all, let me be perfectly clear. A lot of people complain about the "lamestream media" and "fake news". I have been known to use those terms myself---but they mean very different things to different people. For the "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) types, what they mean by "fake news" is news that disagrees with whatever nonsense they are trying to promote. And "lamestream media" means whatever news source that publishes news that they don't want to hear. I mean something very different. For me, "fake news" is news that isn't supported by the facts. And the "lamestream media" is a news service that is more interested in ratings, continued access to important news makers, not offending advertisers, and, building the careers of "star journalists", than the facts.  

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I recently came across an interesting episode of The Big Think's YouTube channel titled Will America’s disregard for science be the end of its reign? One particular part of the show really caught my attention. Neil Degrasse Tyson talks about two specific problems with professional journalists: their need to be the first to break a story, and, their belief in an extremely simplistic definition of "balance".

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The COVID-19 pandemic coverage we all seen lately is a classic example of how the rush to be the first to report an issue does a profound disservice to ordinary citizens. Dr Tam has been reviled in some quarters because she said that ordinary folks shouldn't wear masks. Then she said they should, but a simple cloth mask worked fine. Then she said that a multi-layer mask was important. Some people asked "Why couldn't she make up her mind?"

More recently, we've seen the same process at work with regard to one of the vaccines.

• "The AstraZeneca vaccine is safe." 
• "Well, it can cause blood clots in a very small number of people." 
• "It's not the preferred one." 
• "Let's not give out anymore shots." 
• "It's not that dangerous to people when used for the second dose." 
• "Let's give it to people for their second shot if they've already gotten it for their first." 

Again, some folks are upset about this "flip flopping" and suggest that scientists don't know what they are talking about---. The point is, however, if you really understand how science works, this sort of "flopping back and forth" is exactly what bleeding edge research is supposed to look like. Indeed, if this sort of thing hadn't happened I would have been afraid that the authorities were hiding something from the general public.  

I would expand Degrasse Tyson's point and suggest that a lot of other types of news is pretty much like science reporting. We get the "fast-breaking" stories, but rarely the over-views that emerge among the majority of experts. For example, we often hear about how out-of-control housing prices have become---but rarely anything about how zoning regulations have effectively made high and medium density development illegal on the vast majority of municipal land all across North America. As a result, we simply have more demand for housing than we have supply---which leads to high prices.

Just like Degrasse Tyson suggests with regard to science stories, the Back-Grounder attempts to find the expert consensus on issues instead of the "bleeding edge" debate. The idea is that almost every important story has a background that underlies the day-to-day events. And if the reader can learn about that, they will be able to make sense of what is happening in the immediate here-and-now. For this reason, I find that a great many of my stories keep being read and exciting people's interest---long after I first published them. That's because almost all the important stories that affect people's lives are the result of long-standing structural issues. These don't go away when reporters decide a story is no longer "the flavour of the week". 

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I work hard on the Back-Grounder, so if you find it informative why not subscribe? You get to choose how much you pay. Patreon and Pay Pal make signing up a snap. If you can afford it and you like what I write, what's stopping you?

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The other issue that Degrasse Tyson raises is the reflective tendency of journalists to bring in an opposing point of view for "balance"---no matter how little credibility it might have in the expert community. This was probably the behaviour that made me the angriest. I tried time and time again to point out to reporters that all sources aren't equal and they need to check to see if someone really knows what they are talking about---to no avail. As long as they clearly attributed a quote, they took absolutely no responsibility for whether something they printed was actually true. Eventually, politicians learned that reporters do this, which is why it took years and years of Donald Trump bullshitting the American people before some of them would finally start telling readers and listeners when he was fibbing.

I understand why lamestream journalists do this. First, they are generally run off their feet because they need to keep up the competition to be the first to break a story. You cannot be the first and also be the most accurate---the two values are directly at odds with one another. Secondly, if your news outlet won't give journalists the time and resources to do lots of research, the only way to generate news is by getting quotes from primary sources. And the vast majority of news makers are not going to give a reporter repeated access if the stories produced identify when they lie, confabulate, or, bullshit.

So this secondary problem is a result of the primary one. Access to news makers for quotes is only really essential if you don't give your reporters enough time to do research themselves. But doing research takes much, much more time to do than just asking for a couple of quotes so you can hammer out some copy before the next deadline. (This is why I only write one real story a week instead of trying to come up with "breaking news".) 

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There's a third issue that I want to raise that doesn't come up in the Degrasse Tyson clip. That's the pernicious role that "opinion" plays in the lamestream media. There is a rock-like, core belief among all the reporters I've met that there is an absolutely impervious wall that separates "opinion" from "news". The idea is that "opinion" is just "opinion" and there's no reason at all to subject it to something like truth-testing. 

I can understand where this is coming from. I remember from my first philosophy course at university the specific class where the professor introduced the radical concept that "all opinions are not equal". The point is that if an opinion isn't based on true evidence or consistent with the rules of logic---it is pretty much worthless. A lot of people in my class had a hard time accepting this idea. And they had a point, our democratic society is based on the idea of "all men are created equal". Moreover, throughout human history there have been people who have treated people unfairly and refused to consider their opinions. 

But the key point to take from history isn't that all opinions are equally valuable, rather that we should only use rational reasons for dismissing some of them. Dismissing someone's ideas, for example, because of the colour of his skin or because she has internal reproductive organs is totally irrational. It's identified as such in informal logic by being called "the ad hominem fallacy", or, the attack against the person making the argument versus the argument itself. But refusing irrational prejudice by accepting all opinions as being equally valid is clearly a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Even if the basis of the opinion isn't the result of a reasoning flaw, there is also the issue of the assumptions that the person starts from. 

Moynihan, Wiki Media

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." Daniel Patrick Moynihan

 

 

Part of the problem is the growth of an entire industry devoted to the creation of "alternative facts". There are several elements to this. 

The first was probably the elimination of the "Fairness Doctrine" from US news. This was a law that existed from 1949 to 1987 that said that broadcasters had to do two things: provide a minimum amount of coverage of important social issues, and, ensure that different points of view were given equal access. This law was, in practice, hard to "fine tune" into creating a perfect balance. But it was able to prevent the spread of out-and-out inflammatory propaganda of the sort we saw with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.  

Secondly, there has been a concerted campaign to create a universe of fake facts. This includes things like alternative "think tanks" to push policy based on ideology instead of analysis, pseudo-grassroots organizations that are really controlled by a small number of individual donors, and, a whole world of nuttiness on line. One of  the most wacky is the creation of a "conservative" alternative to the Wikipedia, called the "Conservapedia". 

To just get a flavour of this last thing, I did a search on it about "climate change". This was the first part that I got from it. 

Climate change is the new name used by liberals for their global warming hoax, which they coined as it became obvious that there is no crisis in global warming. The modification in terminology is identical to what liberals did in redefining "evolution" to be "change over time," which of course is a meaningless expression just as "climate change" is. Numerous past predictions of climatic catastrophes have failed to hold up.[1]

I've left the hypertext links in the quoted section so you can see sort of "references" people use to back up their assertions. If you follow back the reference (ie: the "[1]"), you will see two references to Fox News, one to the Wall Street Journal, and, one to LifeSiteNews. The last one has an absolutely appalling rating with NewsGuard.

I'm making a fuss about all of this because I believe editors are missing something tremendously important, namely that a key part of whether or not people believe something comes down to whether or not they see or hear it from a wide variety of sources. We've allowed a whole environment of "alternative facts" grow up around us, and the lamestream media contributes to this whenever it allows people to spout nonsense on their op ed pages.

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Editors don't fact check what they put on their opinion pages. Instead, they tend to use an unconscious notion of what "conventional wisdom" says about things in general. 

To understand this, consider the fact no responsible journalist would ever print an op ed that argued that Jews should be exterminated in death camps because of the international conspiracy identified in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. My point is that they wouldn't do it because the Protocols is a piece of nonsense created by the Imperial Russian secret police in 1903, but rather because they have a general belief that it's not OK to write bad things about Jewish people. (There was that whole unpleasantness in World War Two, after all.) That's what I mean by "conventional wisdom". 

The problem is when you get into other things that are less obvious. The example that Degrasse Tyson uses is climate change. The editors and publishers of the mainstream media took far, far, far too long to look at the evidence and refuse to publish nonsense about something that will probably kill a lot more people than the Holocaust. That's because they were waiting for conventional wisdom to change before they used editorial control to push for a facts-based narrative in their papers. In doing so they were ignoring the fact that what they decided to print in the "mainstream news" has a great deal to do with creating the conventional wisdom that they were relying upon to justify what they printed. 

This is why the Guelph-Back-Grounder doesn't believe that there is a distinction between "news" and "opinion". Both of them should be logical and based on facts. That's why I use logical arguments and put in hypertext links to offer evidence. I get the odd person who opines to me that what I write is "slanted" and "not objective". But I usually respond by asking "What exactly do you find fault with in my argument?"---and haven't gotten a response yet. I don't think that this is because I never make any mistakes, but because the person complaining doesn't have much experience seeing journalism try to reason through things and come up with something that is a closer approximation of reality.    

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That's enough of a rant for one week. Remember to keep your distance, wear a mask, and, get vaccinated ASAP. Other than that, enjoy the warm weather---you know it's not going to last.

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Moreover I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!

The Stupid and the Gullible

Last week I watched the Netflix documentary The Great Hack. It was OK, but something of a disappointment. I thought so because I believed it focused too much on one character, Brittany Kaiser.

Brittany Kaiser. Image c/o Twitter. 

She was a former director for Cambridge Analytica who choose to become a whistle blower after becoming horrified by the company's influence on the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. 

I get why a documentary maker would do this, as she is something of a compelling figure. She had been a human rights campaigner early in life, but became involved in right-wing causes when her parents lost all their money in the 2008 stock market crash and she needed money fast to help them out. (Or at least that is what is alluded to the documentary.) As such, she is a complex, somewhat sympathetic figure that you can build a narrative around. 

But if I'd done the film I would have focused on another figure, one that is only mentioned in passing during the Netflix film: Carole Cadwall. 

Carole Cadwall. Image captured from a YouTube video.
Provided to Wiki Commons by Molly MEP.

She is the reporter who works for the Observer and broke the story of FaceBook and Cambridge Analytica's influence on the Brexit referendum. She outlines what she learned on a 15 minute TED talk that is worth watching.

The important take-aways from this video are that a huge number of people were identified and categorized according to a psychological profile that allowed a specific type of political advert that appealed to their particular concerns to be sent to them---and them alone. The people paying for these ads broke the campaign finances rules. And there was no publicly available repository of adverts that would allow anyone to know what other people were seeing on their Facebook feeds. (The images below were all released due to Parliamentary orders leveled against Facebook, who fought hard to not let them see the light of day.)

It's important to understand that different types of ads were aimed at different types of people. First, consider the following one. It was aimed at sports enthusiasts who have a tendency to vote in fewer numbers than the general public and aren't generally interested in politics.

This ad was for a 50 million pound prize people would win if they could guess the score on every soccer game in the European Championship that year. (The odds were ridiculously high against anyone being able to do that, but the person who came closest would get a 50,000 pound consolation prize.) In order to get a free entry, a person had to fill out a form about what they thought about Brexit. This created a large database of British voters who were probably not very sophisticated politically and were "persuadable" to support leaving the EU.

Using this list and others provided by Facebook, the Leave campaign then sorted out the small fraction of "persuadable voters" according to what their computer programs identified as their key concerns.

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Another weekend and another editorial to hammer out. It's true that I think that writing this blog is an important and useful thing to do. (Someone told me that yesterday.) But it's also work---just like when other people shuffle paper in an office, sell some appliance, install a machine, build a new house, etc. And as such, I only think it's fair that people pay for the work. I don't need much to make it worthwhile. A buck or two a month really is fine---although more is appreciated. It's easy to do using Patreon and PayPal.

One thing I promise is that I will never put this blog behind a paywall. I believe in the idea of information being "free" in the sense of it being available to everyone---even if I don't think that it should be "free" in the sense of no one paying for the work involved.

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One of the key memes that they hammered away at was the idea that 350 million pounds leaves Great Britain for the EU every week. First off, that is the gross amount of money that Britain is charged on paper. As a matter of fact, there are both discounts under various programs that lower that amount plus money that comes back from Brussels into the UK. The net result for 2018 was 8.9 billion pounds, which comes to 171 million pounds a week---less than half the number pushed by the Brexit camp. Anyway, the dubious number was pushed relentlessly and used to argue that the money saved could fix the National Health Service, amongst other things. This was the message sent to anyone identified as being "persuadable" and concerned about the state of the British single payer system.

Other people were concerned about businesses having greater freedom to "do their own thing".

Another issue that was identified as being important to "persuadables" was immigration. One item being pushed was that of Turkey being admitted to the EU---something that was once on the table but is now completely gone now that Turkey has started slipping further and further into authoritarian government. But the Leave campaign never let the truth get in the way of a good meme, so they hammered away at this.

One way to do this was to contrast the average wage in Turkey to that of Britain and suggest that an influx of Turks would crush people's wages.

Having established the "alternative fact" that Turkey was joining the EU, then the Brexit camp then went on to claim that the EU had paid it one billion pounds to help it join. What they failed to mention was that these funds were earmarked to encourage Turkish society to move closer to European standards of democracy and human rights---which would presumably mean fewer people would want to leave their country and come to Europe. Since the country has been moving backwards on these issues, the money has actually been moved towards a more general "Balkans" strategy, and Turkey has been taken off the list of recipients. 

Yet another card to play against Turkey is to point out the fact that it borders unstable nations like Iraq and Syria. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions that if Turkey joins the EU, hordes of Islamic terrorists will arrive in Liverpool to blow up city hall.

It would be wrong, however, to say that the only people targeted were people with a bias against Muslims. The Brexit misinformation campaign targeted people all across the spectrum of political beliefs.

Some ads were aimed at people who were concerned about recent flooding in the UK---which presumably could be stretched to suggest that Britain would be better able to deal with the climate emergency outside of Europe.

Another unlikely Leave advert dealt with whaling. While I couldn't find any evidence that the EU supports whaling, it is true that Norway has a significant whaling industry. And even though it is not part of the EU (partially so it can control it's own fishing policy---which I imagine includes whaling), it does have a treaty that means it is very much the next-best-thing to a member. While it might seem odd to Canadians---who have often had to deal with EU outrage against sealing---but to some anti-whaling advocates, Brussels is seen as an apologist for killing whales.

It also gets tarred with the idea that it supports bull-fighting, simply because Spain is part of the EU.

There were ads targeting European support for Greece in it's debt crisis. This is an interesting divide, as it really comes down to whether or not you consider yourself a citizen of Europe or Great Britain. If the former, then any support for Greece is something like a "transfer payment" of the sort Canada makes between "have" and "have not" provinces and territories. If the latter, then it just seems like money given away in foreign aid.

The Leave campaign also implied that there was something about the EU that was bad for the working man. For example, they posted the following graph showing youth unemployment for selected nations in Europe. As near as I can tell they've cherry picked numbers for Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, France, and, Great Britain.

Of course, what they left out were EU countries that were doing better than the UK, like Germany (7.2%), Austria (9.9%), Denmark (10.9%), Holland (10.8%), and, the Czech Republic (14.9%.) It's also important to compare these numbers with countries similar to the UK outside of the EU, like Canada (10.7%), the USA (8.1%), Australia (12.0%), and, New Zealand (12.2%). I won't go into it, but it's also important to understand that social programs and wage levels are important to consider when comparing unemployment rates across national boundaries. You can have low unemployment rates which are the result of very poor social programs forcing people to take horribly-paid, crappy jobs just to keep from starving. (I suspect that explains the relatively low US number.)

There is also an advert that would suggest that the EU is against labour unions. As a Canadian who always thought we had a much lower percentage of unionized workers than the EU average (28%), I find it bizarre that anyone would argue that leaving the EU is good for worker's rights, but there it is.

Here's a graph from Forbes magazine that compares rates of union membership in 2017. You can judge whether or not the EU is anti-union. (Frankly, I'm kinda surprised to see that Canada has a higher percentage of union members than both the UK and Germany.) I suspect that it's so close to the EU average because of the recent admission of Eastern European countries, which do not have the same level of membership as the older, Western nations. Poland, for example, doesn't even keep track of union membership, but researchers have estimated that as of 2012 it was at about 12%.

Image from Forbes magazine. Used under the Fair Use copyright provision.

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The important thing to remember about the above advertisements (there are lots more, but I tried to give readers an exhaustive sample) is relatively few people would have seen any of them. That's because they were crafted to specific, small percentages of the voting public---based on the profile that had been created using sophisticated computer software.

The people who did see them were folks that were deemed vulnerable to persuasion using this sort of propaganda. It's like a fellow with a big list walked down the street with a piece of chalk and put a big "X" in front of every house where someone was deemed "gullible" or "vulnerable" so someone else could knock on the door to sell them a vacuum cleaner, hot water tank rental contract, or, the "good news" of the Jehovah Witnesses.

This only made sense as a strategy because of a very special circumstance, namely the very close level of entrenched, already-existing support for both sides of the referendum was fairly close. See the following aggregation of public opinion polling during the time frame. 

Graph c/o Wikipedia article and the Wiki Commons.
Image created by T.seppelt.

As you can see from this graph, there was only a maximum of 10% separating the "yes" and "no" options all through the campaign. The end result was a win of only 51.9% versus 48.1%, with a 72.2% turnout. It was a very close race. (Much the same thing could be said about the Trump/Clinton election where Cambridge Analytica/Facebook were doing much the same thing.) My suspicion is that this sort of manipulation only works if there is such a small gap between the two factions in the population and a small change in voting intent can make a big difference in the outcome. 

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How many people in any given society are gullible? Stupid? Racist? (I'm not sure that that actually deserves it's own category. Isn't a racist by definition a mixture of both?) This isn't a trivial issue, and we are going to have to figure out just how much power we can put into the hands of silly people without having our society fly totally to pieces. It does appears that enough exist to create epidemics with easily eradicated diseases like measles. It might also be the case that Great Britain is going to trash it's economy because the new Prime Minister (Boris Johnson) is willing to crash out of Europe using the so-called "hard Brexit". (In that case only time will tell. It might be that the Brexiter's are right and the country will be able to "muddle it's way through" without an economic disaster.)

Democratic societies have always been prone of demagoguery. (The ancient Spartans used to comment on the wanton speed with which the Athenian assembly was willing to get itself into wars. This turned out to be their undoing when the demagogue Alcibiades convinced them to send their fleet on a disastrous expedition to Sicily.) The problem now is that modern technology has created a machinery of demagogic control and is now selling it to the highest bidder. New laws will have to be created to deal with "new normal". In the interim, I hope we can limit the damage.

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Quick and Dirty RSS Tutorial!

I recently used social media to ask a bunch of my friends whether or not they use RSS feeds to follow sources on the Web. I was kinda shocked to see how many people didn't know what RSS is, or, how to subscribe to a site with it. I'm writing this blog post because I think that this shows a dangerous lack of media literacy among people of good will. This will be the last "quick and dirty" post before a real news item. 

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Walled Gardens and Confirmation Bias

Modern people live in a news-saturated environment. Learning about the world around us is like trying to drink from a fire-hose. Not only is it impossible to read, hear, or, watch everything on the Web---it's impossible to scan everything that the Web publishes everyday and decide what tiny fraction of it we want to read, hear, or, watch. This means that people not only have to be discriminating about what they spend their time consuming, they have to pay attention to what technology they put into place to decide what they are exposed to every day.

Take a look at this screenshots from Google Play News Stand (you can always click on an image to see a larger version):

This is a screenshot of Google Play News Stand,
reproduced under the "Fair Use" copyright provision.

This is an example of an "aggregator websites".  These are websites that are designed to bring together individual stories from a wide variety of websites for you to look at so you don't have to manually search around for them. These sites have the same "drinking from a fire hose" problem as individuals do, so they use computer programs to do the actual search. They use instructions that programmers have included in the coding, preferences from the viewers, and, access to personal information of viewers that has been "scraped" from their use of other Web products (eg:  the Google search engine.)

In the case of the Google News Stand screenshot, pay attention to the first story: "Patrick Brown seeks $8 M in damages from CTV News---", it's important to realize that this story has been selected for me personally. That's because the Google analytics software knows who I am and it has a long data file about me---it knows where I live, what political party I support, what news sources I routinely read, how old I am, where I work, etc. The computer program that is "aggregating" the websites that it puts on the April 23 News Stand page knows that I live in Ontario, am interested in politics, and, often read the Toronto Star on line. That's why the first story I see is the one on Patrick Brown.

There is a big problem that people need to understand about this site. Google News Stand is what is known as a "walled garden". By this, I mean that Google gets to choose what does or doesn't get onto this website. In the Google example, this probably only means that you will only see fairly "middle-of-the-road", general consensus stories. In other words, you probably never see anything on it that you couldn't expect to see on the CBC or read in the Toronto Star or Globe and Mail. So forget about any sort of thought-provoking analysis, investigative articles that use detailed research to oppose "conventional wisdom", or, stories that deal with local issues.

Another way of thinking about this is to say that News Stand is a "filter bubble". When an algorithm sets out to select what stories it thinks you might be interested in, it also creates a situation where you no longer get "surprised" or see stories that you violently disagree with. This means that the opportunities for learning something that might lead to changing your mind about an issue are fewer than if someone else---like an idiosyncratic newspaper editor---was deciding what stories to put in front of you. This is a really dangerous thing for society because most---if not all---people are predisposed to look specifically for evidence the supports their pre-existing assumptions and discount that which undermines them. Psychologists call this "confirmation bias".

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Confirmation Bias

To understand this phenomenon, it is important to realize that there two ways to reason: like a philosopher or a lawyer. A philosopher looks at the evidence and arguments and tries to figure out what is the most likely to be true. She may come up with a hypothesis about what is actually the fact, but this is always provisional---if a new piece of evidence comes forth that invalidates that hypothesis, she will discard the hypothesis and create a new one to explain what is going on. In contrast, a lawyer is not trying to find the truth, he is setting out to win. If he sees a piece of evidence that would lose him the case, he will totally ignore it or try to find some way of discrediting that evidence---such as actively seeking out an "expert" who the lawyer thinks will say that the evidence isn't actually harmful to his client. That's because he doesn't really care about truth, but winning. And a lawyer who don't fight for his clients even when he thinks they are guilty can never expect to get ahead in his profession.

(To be fair to lawyers, our system of justice is based on adversarial battle between prosecution and defense. And this, in turn, is based on the idea that people with limited abilities and insight often have to deal with ambiguous situations where no one really does know who is being honest or not. In such cases, it's better for a lawyer to be forced to do all he can to win rather than make him the judge and jury of his client. But for the purposes of this discussion, the two ways of thinking are relevant. Consider, if you will, if a lawyer in a case ever says "Well you've got me there. I've never thought about it that way. I suppose I'm going to have to rethink what I believe about this." Philosophers actually do say such things in scholarly debate.)

Psychologists have found that the natural tendency of people is to think like lawyers instead of philosophers. That's why people who work in the oil industry discount the evidence of climate change. It's also why it is so hard to get many white people to see the privileges that give them advantages over people of colour. It's also why many men are incapable of understanding the effects of their sexist behaviour on women. Human society is absolutely rife with confirmation bias.

Because confirmation bias is so common, our society has developed mechanisms to limit the number of problems that can come from it. The scientific method is one. Several other examples come from the legal system. For example, when a judge rules that "hearsay evidence" is inadmissible, he is specifically using a rule of discourse to overcome a natural tendency for juries to believe what they want to believe. (Hearsay evidence is evidence that is based on second-hand accounts---eg: "I heard so-and-so say that he did it"---where the person who is supposed to have made the original claim is unavailable for cross-examination.) The key problem with hearsay is that the other lawyer and the judge are not able to bring the original person who is supposed to have said something to the stand and ask them whether a: they actually said what they are reported to have said, and, b: any questions that might show that they were mistaken or lying when they said it. If we allow hearsay into a court of law people can be convicted on the basis of gossip and rumour.

Rules like the ones against hearsay evidence are mechanical in nature and not dependent on any individual person being wise enough to understand their importance and remember to apply them in any specific situations. Lawyers and judges have it pounded into their heads at law school that they cannot use hearsay evidence, and, if a judge makes a decision that was based on hearsay evidence, an appeal judge will have to overturn the decision on appeal. This sort of mechanical, culturally-based rule has been created through trial-and-error because of grotesque miscarriages of justice in the past. If you know what to look for, these sorts of fixes exist throughout our society. Examples include the peer-review process for scientific discovery, police officers reading people their rights when being arrested, the rules governing voting procedures, the requirement that all publicly-traded companies have to have regular audits by chartered accountants, and so on. Unfortunately, it is very rare for human society to predict potential problems when a new situation arises and at that time create the cultural "fix" that protects society from confirmation bias. So instead what usually happens is that some ridiculous or catastrophic situation emerges because of confirmation bias, and then---through trial and error---society eventually creates a cultural "workaround" to deal with it. We are currently facing one of those situation with the creation of aggregator services like Google News Stand. The problem with the algorithms that companies like Google use in their web-based news aggregators is that they have created an invisible, mechanical system that encourages confirmation bias among the people who read them. 

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Lest people think I am making a mountain out of a molehill, take a look at the following screenshot from a web-based aggregator that is a little less "savoury" than Google News Stand.

Yup. Read that caption! This is "The Drudge Report".
Image used under "Fair Use" Copy rite provision. 

This is today's headline from The Drudge Report. This is one of the most influential "conservative" news aggregators in America. (Here is the actual website URL. But be careful, it has a lot of "snaky malware" in the advertisements. I have "Privacy Badger" on my browser to identify and delete  "sketchy" advertisements, and I've never seen so much blank space on a webpage before! Clicking on the screenshot above is perfectly safe. As is looking at the Wikipedia article.)

This too is a walled garden. But unlike Google, the fellow who created and runs this aggregator---Matt Drudge---hasn't got huge data files on everyone

Matt Drudge, from his FaceBook page.
 "Fair Use" copyright provision.

who uses the Web. Nor does he have access to Bond-villain-sized mega computers and armies of genius coders. Instead, he just looks at other websites and finds the most salacious stories that fit his own political agenda. And yet, it appears that his website gets about 3 million "hits" a day. (That number sounds impressive---I'd be happy if The Back-Grounder was getting over 100---but remember that the USA is a nation of 300 million. More to the point, it's important to understand that a large number of most website "hits" are generally done by robots doing Dao-only-knows-what.) That's certainly enough to have a significant influence on society. And there is a body of opinion that Drudge has had a huge effect on more "mainstream" media coverage, if only that of dragging down public discourse. As evidence, it appears that The Drudge Report has been important in spreading "important" news stories" such as the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

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One of the ways to "work around" confirmation bias is to expand the pool of people to talk to about things. Presumably, that way you get exposed to different points of view and that broadens your worldview. That was one of the promises of social media. The theory is that we would pontificate about some sort of issue and one of our FaceBook friends would point out the flaw in the argument and then we'd back down. For example, I recently I got all in a tizzy about a tweet that said that the federal government was attempting to remove some provision in the CRTC mandate that forbids the news media from knowingly spreading false news---but a FaceBook "friend" pointed out that the item was dated in 2011---oops! So this does happen. But unfortunately a lot of people use social media to create their own, special "walled gardens" where they allow only people of like mind. The result is what is known as an "echo chamber".  People in these groups take turns whipping each other into a frenzy about various things. Unfortunately, the result is sometimes someone taking all the rhetoric too seriously and then we have situations like like the guy who took an AR-15 into a Washington pizzeria looking for the children enslaved by the pedaphile sex ring operated by Hillary Clinton.  (This also appears to be what happened with the awful van attack in Toronto, which seems to have been inspired by the on-line "involuntary celibate (incel)" culture that exists on groups like 4chan and Reddit.)

Even if people don't end up drowning in the social media version of a cesspit, there are other issues to consider. Increasing numbers of people get most of their ideas from social media like FaceBook, Twitter, etc. There are several problems with these sources. First of all, these systems have a technological bias against long-form communication. Twitter restricts posts to 280 characters. FaceBook has a very limited editing suite. YouTube's advertising policy discourages posts of more than 15 minutes. The companies do this because their primary goal is to maximize the number of clicks, not the quality of discourse. They get paid by advertisers for the number of times someone logs onto the site, both to maximize the number of ads they see and the amount of information that the company gathers about each view. FaceBook makes a lot more money off people zipping from post to post than they do if someone settles into their chair with a cup of tea and spends a good long time reading something like the Back-Grounder.

What this means in term of content is that the social media business model is based on whatever it takes to get people's momentary attention instead of sustained concentration. This is why FaceBook spends so much of it's time trying to get you to gush over cute cat videos or be outraged about some politician. If they could get away with it, they'd probably be showing short snuff videos too.  (That sounds like an outrageous suggestion, but consider the fact that a few years ago a kid at the local university live-streamed a suicide attempt.) That's because what does best on social media are things that appeal to the more instinctual elements of human consciousness and by-pass higher order reasoning. Mainstream news media has understood this for a long time, hence the adage "if it bleeds, it leads".  (If I remember correctly, one of my first letters to an editor was a complaint about The Mercury printing a salacious photo of a woman in a bikini with a knife at her throat.)

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Introducing RSS Feeds

Knowing that social media is playing games with our access to public information doesn't totally

Nope, not going to happen.
Leonard Nimoy, Fair Use

remove the problem. After all, all human beings still have the lower brain functions and they are still important to our survival. Knowing we are fallible creatures doesn't make us into purely logical beings devoid of emotion. We will still find ourselves being fooled into having an emotional reaction that gets us doing stuff that we wouldn't if we'd had a bit more time to think things through. (After all, how many of us are totally immune to the siren call of advertising?) The only thing we can hope to do is find one of those "workarounds" like the one I discussed dealing with hearsay evidence in courtrooms.

Luckily people far smarter than me have been thinking about

This is the RSS Icon,
look for it on the website.

these issues for a long time. One result of this thinking was the creation of what is known as "Really Simple Syndication software or "RSS".  What this allows people to do is to subscribe (what's what "syndication" means) to those particular blogs that you really want to read. The way to understand this is to think that what you are doing is creating your own, personal newspaper---instead of letting Google analytics or Matt Drudge do it for you. What you do is find the icon on the left on one of the websites you want to follow, copy the relevant info, and then add it to the feeder you have decided to use. (Here are some good instructions about how to use it.) In my own case, I now use a Feeder add-on to my Chrome web-browser. What this does is create a list of websites that shows whether new content has been uploaded to them. When I read these new posts (or listen to new podcasts), they are then marked as "read" and removed from the "new category". If I look at the list of posts and see stuff I don't want to read, I can just click next to it and it becomes "read". And if I see a long list and I don't think I want to see any of them, I can click next to the title of the list, and they are all marked "read". When something new comes along, I see it added to the number under the icon on the top of my browser.

My own personal RSS feed. 

This has several advantages over other options. It is possible to set up a link on a web page that will email new posts to readers. But this clutters up your email and it causes formatting problems so you don't really see exactly what the author really wanted you to see. Secondly, it isn't as easy to glance at a list of website notices in order to decide what you do or do not want to read when they are mixed in with other traffic. In a way, an RSS feed is like when we read an old paper edition of a newspaper---I routinely discarded the "Real Estate" and "Sports" sections and mainly read the first one. You don't want to have to open each individual email from all your web sites to see what's inside. With an RSS feeder I can tell at a glance what I want to read and what I want to discard---just like with the Toronto Star.

People often say "well, I just go back once in a while to look at the pages I like---I don't need to subscribe". That doesn't really happen with most people, though. Instead, they log onto social media,

Aaron Swartz,
one of the "good guys"
image c/o Wiki-Commons

look at cute cat pictures, get angry about that awful politician that they are being told to hate, etc, look at the time, are horrified about how much they've wasted, and, run off to do something else. That's not an accident---very clever, very well-paid people who studied human psychology at university have set up social media sites to get you to do that. In contrast, very idealistic people (if you have the time, read this article about Aaron Swartz, one of the RSS inventors---warning, it has a sad ending) have been trying to push back against this avalanche of corporate greed through things like RSS feeds.

A reader might at this point ask "What's the difference in subscribing to a bunch of RSS feeds and using an aggregator like Google News Stand or The Drudge Report? Aren't they all "walled gardens"?" Yes, they are---but the significant difference is that YOU get to create the walled garden, not some algorithm or an individual with an axe to grind. Moreover, the decision to choose whether or not to subscribe to a site using and RSS feed is both conscious and rational. It requires a moment's reflection, and, uses the cerebral cortex instead of the "reptile brain".  Almost no one consciously decides to subscribe to a feed of never-ending cute kitten memes. And almost no one "instinctively" posts links to long reads. Choosing to use an RSS feed is a choice to refuse to be manipulated by social media. 

Another thing to realize about actively subscribing to a blog through a RSS feed is that you are investing in a "relationship of trust" with the author. Part of the problem with fake news is that a lot of it appears to come from credible sources because the standardized format means that what you see is pretty much the same whether it comes from The New York Times or some teenagers in Macedonia. If you take the time to subscribe and read repeated posts, you have a much, much better chance of learning whether or not the blog can be trusted. This is exactly the same thing as when you find a good trades person and stick to them instead of just choosing the first guy who shows up when you search for "Guelph plumbers". If you get all your info based on what you see on FaceBook you might find the odd nugget of gold---but you are going to find a lot of gravel too. Why not subscribe to the vein of gold instead of hoping for another nugget to come along some time soon?

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Of course, I have a vested interest in getting people to start subscribing to various blogs instead of just cruising social media. I want you to subscribe to the "Back-Grounder". (I also want people to pay me through Patreon too.) But there is a bigger point. Companies like Google and FaceBook are driving the old newspapers into the dirt. If you won't support the Quixotic attempts to get some sort of quality local media off the ground, we won't have any local news coverage at all.

I was at a local get-together the other day and someone said "if delegates don't come to City Council, then the newspapers won't say that so many public presentations were in favour of the proposal". She knows that there are no real "newspapers" in Guelph, but she still made the point reflexively. But the fact is that besides Adam Donaldson and his live twitter feed, there is no good coverage of City Council. And besides "the Guelph Back-Grounder", there's no investigative journalism happening either. So it doesn't really matter how many folks show up at a Council meeting to push for a proposal---simply because almost no one has any way of knowing.

To be honest, this situation really concerns me. It's why I looked into if anyone was serious about replacing "The Mercury" when it was finally taken off life-support. And it's why I decided to start writing this blog when I realized that no, no one was working on a replacement. It's also why I keep asking for support on Patreon. No one is going to to work as a reporter giving Guelph good coverage of things like Council meetings unless we develop the culture of paying for news. And in any social movement there needs to be people who take the first steps. As little as a dollar a month makes a difference. It's a concrete statement that you think local news is important.

Why You Should Support "The Guelph Back-Grounder"

Two recent stories in what I call the "lame-stream media" really clarify why it is that I've started publishing "The Guelph Back-Grounder". Since it's been a long time since I've published a story---and I've only had one reader actually give me some money for reading the website---I thought I'd send off a quick "advertorial" to explain exactly why I think it is important for readers to support it.

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The first story comes from the National Post about suicides at the University of Guelph. It mentions that there have been four students who killed themselves since last September and members of the admin have been walking around residence "checking in" to see how people are faring. The idea is that there has been a rash of suicides and the school needs to do something about them. But nowhere in the story does the reporter make any effort to find out if there really has been an extra-ordinary number of suicides on campus.

If you look at stats Canada you will find that there is an average suicide rate amongst per 100,000 males age 20-24 of .00016. There are also 22,648 students at the U. of Guelph (full, part-time, undergraduate, graduate), which means that four suicides in one year is .00018.

Complexities to consider. Suicides among males are higher than females. And also among ages 20-24 as opposed to 15-19. But, there are no numbers I could easily find for university students as opposed to non-university students, so this is bound to be a non-representative sample because many students are away from family and friends for the first time in their life. They are also subject to stresses that many other young adults in this cohort are not subjected to.

So the number of four suicides seems a little higher than the average but well within the range. That is because the average that I've quoted (from a stats Canada website) is a mathematical abstraction. Simply through random distribution, there will be higher numbers and lower ones too.  This is especially true when such a small change in the size of the group (that is, if there were 3 or 5, instead of 4) would have been a very significant change in the final outcome (ie: the ".00018" number.) And since "clumping" is part of random distribution, I would suggest, therefore, that there has not been an epidemic of suicides at the U. of Guelph, but rather just what would be expected.

I realise that this is an emotionally-charged issue, which might be part of why no official has "pushed back" on this story. But public policy should be driven by numbers and dispassionate analysis instead of emotions. If we don't do that, we end up doing things that were never intended.

With that in mind, I think it's important to understand that every time the university puts money into increased counselling and support services for students they have to pull it out of other parts of the budget. There is a well-recognised phenomenon in university administration that there has been a huge increase in resources being pulled from academic and physical resources and redirected to these support services. (People often hide this fact by saying that the problem is the growth of "middle management". This might be part of the problem, but I would suggest that this is just an attempt to evade the fact that a lot of the people are remedial teachers, therapists, people who help students with disabilities, etc---that no one wants to be seen as opposing. In addition, adding in all these support services makes navigating the university environment more complex, which means that more middle managers are necessary to make sense of the Byzantine bureaucracy.) This has been subsidized by replacing tenured professors with poorly paid sessional lecturers, deferring building maintenance, replacing full-time unionized maintenance staff with contract employees, and, increasing tuition fees. In effect, every attempt to make the lives of students a little easier has been done by making the lives of lecturers and support staff worse, letting buildings fall apart, lowering the quality of education, and, making university less accessible for poor students. This is what is called "the opportunity cost", and it's something that is never mentioned in lame-stream media stories about things like university suicides.

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The second story I wanted to talk about comes from the CBC and it has the headline "1 child or youth injured by gunfire nearly every day in Ontario, pediatricians find". The person who casually hears about this might think "Wow!  An epidemic." But if you carefully read the story you will find out that the age group includes everyone aged from newborn to twenty-four. Most people wouldn't consider anyone age twenty to twenty-four as being anything other than an adult. Moreover, it turns out that the study included as a "fire-arm" bb, pellet, and, air soft guns as well as regular fire arms. Again, most people don't think of a daisy bb-gun when they read "gunfire".

Stats Canada says that there are 2.22 million people in Ontario, age 0-14. There isn't a similar break down of age 14 to 24, but let's assume that there are similar birth/immigration rates for both cohorts. That means that we can divide 2.22 million by 14 and get the birth/immigration rate per year, or .159 million per year. Multiply that by ten, and you get the number of people aged 15 to 24, or 1.59 million. Add those together, and you 3.81 million Ontarions aged 0 to 24. Divide this number by the number of cases mentioned in the article, 355, and you get one injury per 10,730 "youths".

When I was a student in high school I didn't know anyone who got killed or injured by a firearm. (Although, I did have a pellet from a pellet gun bounce off a tree and hit me in the cheek---it stung.) I did, however, know about six guys who got killed in drunken car accidents. (It was the 1970s, a time very, very different from now.) Well, lets compare the two. I have a statistics Canada page open that says that 51,487 people aged 0-24 in Canada were injured or killed in car accidents in 2010. I looked at the population for Canada, and it appears (from some calculation) that Ontario had 39% of the total Canadian population in 2012. So if we multiply 51,487 by 39%, we get a figure of 20,080 fatalities and injuries in Ontario for one year. Lets be conservative and ignore the increase in population between 2012 and 2016, that means we have one injury by car accident per 190 "youths". This begins to fit into my personal experience as a teen. (I'm not saying I knew 960 "youths", but the fatality rate in rural Canada during the 1970s would have been much larger than today.  Like I said, a very different time.)

When we explain exactly what is going on beyond the headline, and, compare the numbers to those from auto accidents, it turns out that there really doesn't seem to be much of a problem here after all.

&&&&

I used to write a weekly column in the old paper "Mercury". That's when I started doing the sort of fact checking that I have done above. I found that 15 minutes with an Almanac or other standard reference text was often enough to show how totally ridiculous many news stories really were.  This was the basis of many of my columns. They were plenty popular, but I stopped after three years because the "Merc" editors never offered to pay me anything for them. Indeed, I had to beg for a "free" subscription. Eventually, I realized that I was just taking the bread out of the mouth of some professional journalist, and I didn't want to do that---especially when the likes of Ken Thompson and Conrad Black were making fortunes squeezing profit out of the paper.

Another reason I quit was because I started to absolutely loath the lame-stream press. After getting into the habit of "deconstructing" these sorts of stories I started to realize that the people controlling the media usually don't give a damn about the public good or the truth. What they are trying to do is sell advertising and make money, period. And to do that, you have to be emotional and sensational instead of honest and contextual. The two stories I referred to above are pretty standard fair in that they are designed to whip the public into a frenzy so people will share stories on social media, which will generate advertising revenue. When copy is written to be as sensational as possible for these reasons, the name for it is "clickbait". In this case, both stories were designed to crank up people's biological anxiety over the safety and well-being of children.



This sort of "journalism" is incredibly damaging to the public interest because it is worse than keeping the public uninformed----it is actually filling their heads with misinformation that confuses them about what is or is not important when they are making up their minds about public policy issues.

Since the Trump campaign there has been a lot of talk about "fake news". Originally, this came from a Vice Media story about how a group of teenagers in Macedonia had managed to make a lot of money by creating false stories that supported the Trump campaign, post them on fake news sites, and, convince gullible right-wingers to share them extensively in the "Trumposphere". The result was a lot of money being raised by Google Ad Sense, which had advertising on these stories.

But "fake news" is more than just teens in Macedonian playing dumb Republicans. That's at the farthest end of a continuum that starts with reporters who don't have enough time to do any back ground research to be able to put any given story in a context, and, editors who tell them to "sex up" a story with lots of emotion so the story can go the rounds in social media. And all of this is dangerous to a democracy because it is ultimately a form of very effective propaganda. This isn't propaganda for any government faction, it's propaganda for the least rational, most emotional part of the human mind. It's an institutional bias towards outrage, poor judgement, lynch mobs, and, the misuse of scarce public resources. 

&&&&

After my initial feeble attempts at being a journalist were over, I went through a "dark time" where I basically hated all professional reporters because I thought that the majority of them were actually destroying our democratic system by spreading dangerous lies about the world around them. I've since become a bit more mellow and now think that the real problem is that most of them are being chased around from story to story by editors who don't allow them the time to think about what they are doing----let alone do any background research.

&&&&

I've just "knocked around" a bit on the Internet to come up with the deconstruction that I've done on these two stories (even by doing this, however, it has taken me a few hours to write this story.) But to provide a context for an issue often requires a great deal more work than that. The last story that I wrote about the Ontario Municipal Board, for example, involved a very careful read of a fairly complex, technical analysis of the board by an independent scholar. This took an hour or two careful reading every day for about a month---but most of this isn't obvious when you read the finished article. Almost all professional reporters simply don't have time to do this sort of back ground research. Instead, they get assigned a story, make a few phone calls of people that they know will give them a good "quote", and write a "he said"/"she said" story. Then it's time to write the next one. As a result, you will get lots of stories where people complain bitterly about not being able to find an affordable apartment---but nothing about how for decades an obscure tribunal has blocked attempt after attempt to build apartment buildings in Ontario cities and as a result we have a huge shortage of rental housing.

The story I'm working on now involves a discussion of the old Carnegie library in Guelph with an attempt to draw parallels to the current debate over building a new main branch. This too is a lot of work. I've spent hours and hours already reading microfilms of rotten, hard-to-read, copies of the old "Evening Mercury". There are no indexes, which means I have to look at every single front page in order to not miss the very rare story that is relevant.  What is really maddening is that much is missing---front pages are gone or chopped to pieces. Months and months of the paper are simply missing too. But I have still found some interesting information and a lot of great context that describes what Guelph was like when the Carnegie library was built and replaced. This is really important if anyone is going to come to an informed opinion about the current debate over replacing the current library. But this is exactly the sort of work that no reporter at "Guelph Today" or "Mercury/Tribune" will ever do. They simply don't have the time. And I certainly don't expect Adam Donaldson at "Guelph Politico" to do it either---I don't understand where he gets all the energy to do what he already does.

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I like putting out "The Guelph Back-Grounder", I think it serves a useful purpose. But it is a lot of work. And this isn't supposed to be a charity. I'm trying to run this as a business, and a business needs revenue to keep going. I have managed to cut my costs down to the bone, but it still generates them. Authors don't want to give out review copies of books anymore, so if I review a book, I have to buy it. People won't take you seriously if you don't look "serious", so I have to generate a bare minimum of that sort of thing. I just spent $20 on business cards. I use "Blogger" because it is free, but I'm sure lots of people who look at the website are saying "Why doesn't he use a more professional-looking website?" Money. I can't just pull images off the internet because that would infringe on copyright and be stealing from artists, and sometimes I just cannot find a public domain image that works, so I have to buy an image from Shutter Stock:  more money.

I have an OK job, but I also have dependents, so any extra money I can make is really appreciated. More to the point, the public has to realize that you can't expect to get good journalism if you refuse to pay for it. I have Ad Sense adverts on my site, but they only make money for general, "click bait", style stories. Those kids in Macedonia will never get involved in a Canadian election because the entirety of Canada is too small to make real money off Ad Sense---so forget about local Guelph news. I've had adverts on my other website for years, and in a good month day I will make something like five cents off it. How does this work for Google? Well Google only pays in $100 increments, which means that it has had over $50 of my money sitting in an account---which it can use to fund its ventures---for about ten years. Since there are hundreds of thousands of bloggers in the same boat, you can see where Ad Sense makes Sense.  ;-)

If people want local news, they are going to have to pay for it. And if they want good local news, they are going to have to pay for that too. If they don't, the free market will give them "click bait" and what happens when a small number of reporters are being chased around from one "he/said, she/said" story to another. If people won't pay Adam Donaldson and myself to provide good news for Guelph, then no new people are going to come along and do the same thing when we eventually burn out, move on, or, just die in the traces.

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After the old paper "Merc" died there was a lot of "boo hoo, what are we going to do?" Most of that seems to have disappeared and people have adapted to the "new normal". Well, if ever there was a case of "the frog in the pot", news coverage in this city is it. I can remember the old, locally-owned Mercury. It had reporters who actually did research and sometimes even provided context. Then it got bought out by the chains. And there were ten horrible years when it changed hands every year. Each time, there were fewer faces in the news room. Context and investigation ended altogether. Then it stopped hiring local reporters and just brought in people from out-of-town who'd been downsized out of another paper in the chain. These people didn't know anything at all about the history of Guelph and didn't know who were "in the know" on any given story. The quality of even "he/said, she/said" stories fell through the floor. The editors knew circulation was dropping, so they told people to "sex up" stories. As a result, editorial policy seemed to become "stir the pot" and "get people upset". This certainly didn't help circulation, but it made ordinary voters more outraged over trivial matters. Even so, when the paper "Merc" disappeared, the on-line replacements of "Guelph Today" and the "Merc/Tribune" came along, they were much worse.

The only way this decline is going to end is if people start supporting alternative media. And in the case of "The Guelph Back-Grounder" that means three things:

• Subscribe to Patreon with micro payments. Even a dollar a month will make a difference.
• Make a one-time donation through the tip jar. Again, even a dollar will help.
• Advertise your business or community group directly through the Back-Grounder. It has a local readership that is a specific demographic that is community-focused and progressive. If that fits your business or charity profile, contact me ( thecloudwalkingowl@gmail.com .) Rates are reasonable because readership is still relatively low, and, this form of advertising goes straight into the blog format---so it is immune to ad blockers.  

Even if you think that my stories are awful and someone better should be doing this, you should support me. If I can't make any money doing this, no one else is going to try to do the same thing and try to out-compete me. And the number of people who are lunatic enough to put the time and effort I'm putting into this thing "on spec" are vanishingly small. If "the fool who rushes in where angels fear to tread" can't make any money off a venture, no angel is ever going to try to do it in the future. I'm what you've got, so "use it or lose it".

Bill Hulet

The Rise of Fake News

Executive Summary:

The news media has been going through rapid changes over the last 20 years because of both financial chicanery and technological change. In the recent US presidential election it was revealed that websites publishing totally fake news actually out-performed real news sites on social media. This article explains the forces governing these changes, explains the rise of fake news, and suggests that the same forces are at work in what remains of the local corporate media in Guelph. It ends with a suggestion that citizens need to support alternative media---such as Guelph Politico and The Guelph Back-Grounder---if they are going to retain anything like a real local news infrastructure.

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Yesterday I had a very fun interview with Adam Donaldson at the "Open Sources" radio show he does at CFRU. (When he publishes it on-line I'll tell you readers.) He mentioned in passing that it's been about a year since "the Mercury" folded. This led to a conversation about what is happening to the news business and the task of being an independent, self-employed journalist. Since then, I've been thinking a lot about where news is at in the 21st century.

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There have been a flurry of stories recently about the impact that fake news sites and social media had on the last American presidential election. The issue isn't that there is such a thing as fake news---after all The National Enquirer has been printing that sort of thing for a very long time--but rather the way social media encourages far too many people to believe that it is true. When The National Enquirer is published it has to go through a long supply chain to end up shelved next to your grocery's cash register. And the company has a long and carefully-crafted brand image that the customer knows about.

The story that your friends forward to you on Facebook is totally different. Anyone with a passing knowledge of website design can create a fake template that looks "professional" which suggests that it is a legitimate news organization that publishes real news stories. Moreover, whereas The National Enquirer has to negotiate with advertisers and have them pay up front to sell their wrinkle cream in amidst stories about the Loch Ness monster and the escapades of the Royal family, these websites can sign up with Google Ad Sense in fifteen minutes and not have to explain to any business person why they are publishing fake news.

In short, it has become very, very easy to create fake news sites and fund them with advertising revenue sources---even if you don't give a damn about whether what you are saying is truthful or not.   

The second thing to realize is that social media has created a huge readership base that is disconnected with the usual informal mechanisms that people use to judge the truth value of an information source. When I was young people had very firm opinions about newspapers, magazines, etc. I can remember my parents snorting about a specific newspaper and saying "oh that's just a scandal rag---you can't believe anything you read in that".  News organizations used to be afraid of destroying public trust in their organization, because if it ever happened, they would probably lose these readers for the rest of their lives. Getting caught writing blatantly fake news would be a disaster.

But nowadays many people only get their news from things like Facebook, Twitter, or, comedy shows. This means that they are receiving discrete "bits" of news totally devoid of a context. I don't know how many times I've had friends send links on my feed to stories that were out and out fake, and I easily showed why by accessing a fact-checking site like Snopes.

This happens for a variety of reasons.

First of all, when a story is recommended to you through a Facebook feed they all look the same. This is because of the mechanics of recommending stories.  You are encouraged to write a little introduction "I just saw this on the web and wow, does it ever explain why things are the way they are". Then when you put in the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address, Facebook automatically selects a few lines plus a graphic image to identify the story. This "levels the playing field" in a way that confuses people used to assessing the truth value of a newspaper by looking at the masthead, the quality of the paper, the sort of font used, etc. If everything looks the same, then people never develop an unconscious ability to separate the authoritative and respectable from the questionable and disreputable.

Secondly, social media is social, which is to say that it has more in common with "small talk" at a party than a philosophy seminar at university. People at parties who try to pick holes in the opinions of other people are not "good guests" (which is why people often think that I am a huge pain in the butt.) What this means is that the vast majority of people---even if they suspect that a recommended story is baloney---will not respond to a piece of fake news by pointing out obvious inaccuracies. That's just not what "nice" people do!

Even worse, social media is also like a "party" in that it picks the "guest list" and makes sure that only some people---and advertisers---get invited. This is the infamous "echo chamber" effect. People tend to associate with people of like mind, which means that they are shielded from unpleasant people (like me) pointing out errors in reasoning or reliance on inaccurate information sources.

So while the ability to create fake news is easier than ever before, because it is spread by social media, people now have a much harder time identifying fake news as "fake" than they have had in the past. 

Beyond the "echo chamber" effect of people tending to clump together into groups of like minded individuals, Google AdSense has also created the new ability to individually craft advertisements to fit the specific browsing history of individuals. This means that when you or I look at the same site using the Google search engine, we see different advertisements---based on what the Google algorithm sees you as being interested in.  And in the last presidential election in the USA, it meant that the Trump campaign could "zoom in" on the people who were passing around and reading stories that slagged Hillary Clinton and buy advertising for Donald Trump to get out the vote.

Now this ability of advertisers to connect with a specific demographic---totally based on their reaction to "news" content---allows people creating fake news sites to make a lot of money. They did this by crafting news stories that would attract the sort of person they knew their advertisers would want to fund, and, by watching how often their stories ended up being shared in places like Facebook. And since they were making all of this stuff up anyway, it means that they could keep experimenting until they found a "sweet spot" that got maximum sharing and maximum ad revenue. The people who were able to do this made a lot of money. Some of the people who did so have been identified---one cluster are a bunch of teenagers from Macedonian, of all places! This "positive feedback loop" rewarded the fake news people and ensured that they continued to produce it.

  

(This teenager only identified as "Victor" is the editor of fake news site, "Total News". For the past several months leading up to the presidential election, fake news stories like the ones written on Victor's site flooded social media. From a "Daily Mail" story.)

This means that at a time when it is tremendously easy to create fake news, and extremely hard for ordinary people to identify it as such, there is a tremendous financial inducement for individuals to do so. 

In effect, we are facing a "perfect storm" where several technological innovations are creating a whole industry designed to pulling the wool over people's eyes. The result is the following trend. In the last American election fake news was shared more often than real news.

From BuzzFeed News
"This Analysis Shows How Fake Election
News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook"

&&&&

This alone would be bad enough, but the mainstream news organizations have been declining in quality for at least twenty years and are now at the point where it is extremely hard to believe that any of them are still worth defending. Again, this is the result of a "perfect" storm, one of a totally different type.

At one time local newspapers---like "The Mercury"---were tremendously profitable. This was because they had stable readership, a constant flow of advertising revenue, and, no effective competition. Unfortunately, various big business types like Conrad Black, Ken Thompson, etc, figured out that if you bought a small town newspaper you could dramatically improve profitability by laying off editorial staff without having any immediate discernible effect on revenue. So what they would do is buy a newspaper for more than it was worth given it's current profits, lay off a bunch of reporters, and, use reprinted stories from other news organizations and syndicated columnists to substitute for the lack of original, local content. By cutting editorial staff, the profits of the paper would go up to the point where the owner could pay off the investors that he borrowed from to buy the paper in the first place. Often, he would then sell the paper at a profit to another investor. Then the process would start all over again. When I started hanging around "the Merc" many years ago this process had just started and for about ten years the paper changed hands about once a year. And every time it did so, there would be fewer people in the news room.

This led to a tremendous decline in news content. But because subscribers and advertisers had nowhere else to go, most people just grumbled and "sucked it up" while venture capitalists bled their town's news infrastructure dry. Then along came the Internet. People found that they could access news on-line for free and advertisers found that they could target advertisements directly at the people most likely to want their products. This left the old news organizations in a terrible bind. Their only competitive edge---local, high-quality news content---had been destroyed by the years of cost-cutting to pay for junk bonds. This meant that they had no loyal customer base to support them, so their revenue effectively dried up and papers like The Mercury went out of business.

Venture capitalists had already destroyed the "brand" of mainstream media so when significant competition arrived from the Internet, mainstream media no longer had a loyal customer base to support them. 

What is left of the "legacy media" has been trying to adapt to the new reality. Unfortunately, the ways that they have tried to do so have only accelerated the decline in quality news collection.

One way to protect an existing brand is by hyping up individuals into "stars" and then building customer loyalty around them. Probably the best example of this corporate strategy is the way the CBC has been pushing specific "stars" such as Rex Murphy and Jian Ghomeshi, but there are other examples in the private sector such as The Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente. What the publishers are trying to do is two-fold.

Primarily, they are attempting to use a specific person to access tribal loyalty of a specific fraction of the general public. In the case of Murphy and Wente, it is obviously right-wingers who don't believe in climate change and who think that there is a class of "social engineers" who are out to change the world into some sort of socialist, "politically correct", dystopia. In Ghomeshi's, it was an attempt to draw in the young, urban, "hip" demographic that CBC radio had pretty much lost.

In all three cases, the decision seems to have been somewhat successful. Lots of people seem to like Rex Murphy, Jian Ghomeshi, and, Margaret Wente. The problem is, however, that when you hire people and make them stars based on "tribal identity" instead of their ability to actually do good research and reason clearly, you end up creating monsters. What is the definition of "stupid"?---someone who refuses to listen to evidence that contradicts their deeply held beliefs and cannot understand when someone points out the flaws in their thought process. I would argue that that pretty much describes someone who ends up being a media star aimed at a specific demographic. Creating media stars is a process of rewarding people because they are stupid in a particularly popular way.

So it turns out that Rex Murphy's inability to understand the truth of climate change has been greased by lucrative speaking contracts by the oil patch and our public broadcaster embarrassed itself by saying it's lack of action on a clear conflict of interest was because Murphy is an "independent contractor" instead of a "paid employee". It also turns out that CBC had invested so much into creating a star out of Jian Ghomeshi that they allowed him to treat the women around him in a way that would have led to a "less important" employee's dismissal within an instant. And The Globe and Mail has made it abundantly clear that there is absolutely nothing Margaret Wente can do in terms of plagiarism that will lead to her dismissal. The problem ultimately comes down to the story of the lady riding the tiger, once a media institution goes to the effort of building up a "star" personality, the name recognition (and the power that brings) belongs to the celebrity and not the organization. The conservative media in the US built Donald Trump up into a star too, but once they tried to reign him in, he ended up eating them.

The legacy media has attempted to stop it's decline by creating media stars. In doing so, however, it has accelerated the decline of accurate, high-quality content.

Another way that the existing media is attempting to stay alive is by throwing their objectivity out the window in ways that save them money. One recent example involved The Globe and Mail's Deirdre Kelly writing a glowing story about a Northern diamond mine without making any serious reference to local opposition---or stating that De Beers Diamonds paid for the trip. It even seems that Kelly may have actually received a "gift" of some diamonds from Birk's diamonds.  Wow!  A paper can save a lot of money if the expenses for their feature stories get paid for by outsiders. Indeed, it would appear that The Globe has a whole department called "the custom content group" who's job it is to write stories that accompany advertisements called "advertorials".

Actually, this has been a pretty standard activity in newspapers for a long time. The "Travel", "Homes", "Style", and, "Cars", features of newspapers have for a very long time been not much more than "advertorial" sections where "the custom content group" of your paper writes "puff pieces" in order to get advertising from airlines, real estate agencies, clothing retailers, and, auto dealerships. In addition, for a very long time opinion pieces on editorial pages have often been written by highly funded "think tanks" which are often not much more than propaganda organizations that exist to send slanted "free copy" to newspapers that are desperately trying to cut costs. What is new is the way this sort of chicanery is bleeding into the part of the newspaper that is supposed to be "fair", "balanced", and, "objective".

One of the points that Adam Donaldson made in our conversation was that he thinks that most of the people who were upset about The Mercury going out of business seem to have accepted that the new replacement, Guelph Today, is an adequate substitute. I have to disagree. The old corporate media did not serve our community well, and I see no evidence that it will do much better of a job in a new "post-paper" age. People should think about some of the issues that I've raised in the above essay.

Guelph Today is completely paid for through advertising. This means that it's primary loyalty is always going to be to the advertisers, not it's readers.

Secondly, it's revenues are based on traffic at the website, not a fixed payment per advertisement. This means that there will be constant financial pressure on reporters to write more and shorter articles instead of longer, in-depth ones. If a story is 10,000 words long, it will get just as many clicks as one that is only 100 words long. And if a reporter writes 100, 100 word articles the paper will make 100 times as much advertising revenue for them as it does for one 10,000 word story. This is a prescription for "dumbing down" the readership, as complex ideas encompassing new information simply cannot be written in short, snappy articles.

Finally, if you look at "Guelph Today" you can see that at the end of every story there are buttons that encourage people to share the story on Facebook, Twitter, or, email. (As there are on mine.) This means that part of the advertising strategy of news organizations like "Guelph Today" is to encourage people to share the stories through social media. If they want to "hit the jackpot" (like those kids in Macedonia) and make a lot of money off a story, they are going to have to get a lot of people to share it. And, the last US federal election has shown the best way to do this is to craft sensationalist stories that appeal to a specific tribe of people who already have strong preconceived notions. If a corporate, for-profit business uses the same tools and revenue source as the purveyors of fake news, how long is it going to be before they start following the same strategy in order to pay off investors?

This is why I believe that the people of Guelph should be supporting initiatives like Adam Donaldson's Politico and The Guelph Back-Grounder. This is actually in some ways an interesting time. The new technology of the Internet has "leveled the playing field" in some interesting ways. It really doesn't cost much to put out a news magazine anymore. Equally important, through Patreon and Pay Pal, it is possible for a "little guy" to raise money off content without onerous bank fees eating up all the revenue. But people are going to have to want to support projects like these through subscription fees. Why not advertising? Well, if you have read the above article, you should probably have seen that underlying just about every problem that I have identified is the pervasive and pernicious influence of advertising. If you read an on-line news source for free, YOU are the product for sale, not the story. Even if you aren't looking at advertising, your information is being collected, packaged and being sold to advertisers. If you pay for what you read, then you are the ultimate boss, not some corporate marketing directory.

This isn't to say that Politico and the Back-Grounder are aiming to put corporate media out of business. We aren't going to make the CBC irrelevant either. But if the community decides to financially support "outsiders" who bring informed, newsworthy stories to the community, they can act like "scrappy little dogs" who can keep the bigger "media oxen" from trampling the community into the ground. If you find my argument convincing, take a look at the two buttons on the upper right of page and figure out how much you can give to support the Back-Grounder. And if you can't afford to give me money---something I understand completely---share the Back-Grounder on social media, add a button if you have your own website, subscribe to me on twitter, or do something else to spread the word about the site.